When the service of a compressed dynamic image is provided through broadcast, a network, or the like, the upper limit of a reproducible frame frequency is defined according to the decoding capability of a receiver. Thus, it is necessary for a service-providing side to restrict only provision of a service of low frame frequencies, or to simultaneously provide a service of a plurality of high and low frame frequencies, taking the reproduction capability of a distributed receiver into consideration.
Receivers which are compatible with the service of high frame frequencies incur a high cost, which is a factor hindering their distribution. Since only inexpensive receivers dedicated to services of low frame frequencies were distributed initially, if service providers start services of high frame frequencies in the future, viewing the services will not be possible without a new receiver, which is another factor hindering distribution of the services.
For example, in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), time direction scalability in which image data of respective pictures which constitute dynamic image data undergoes hierarchical encoding has been proposed (refer to Non-Patent Literature 1). A reception side can identify the layer of each picture based on a temporal ID (temporal_id) that has been inserted into the header of a Network Abstraction Layer (NAL) unit, and can perform selective decoding up to layers commensurate with a decoding capability.